This Section of the Implementation Segment will try to give a representative picture of the industrial suppliers who offer EHR products and services in several major categories. Those suppliers mentioned will be pointed to their individual Web sites for their description of their products and services but the discussion here will be to place each of these capabilities into a general overall context.

In addition to the ANSI accredited Standards Develop Organizations, industry associations also produce “Industry Standards” that may later be transferred to an ANSI-accredited Standards Developer Organization (SDO) and advanced to voluntary consensus standard status. Industry Associations may also engage in other activities that promote products and services common to that association’s interests. These industry  examples are given in this section of the EHR Implementation Segment.

 Andover Working Group

 This industry consortium was formed in 1996 with major participation by Hewlett Packard (now Agilent Technologies) to utilize HL7’s communication standard, in concert with others, to arrive at a common platform for communication among healthcare applications. In 1998 it had delivered a standards profile specification called “Enterprise Communication Framework” as the result of the work of its 300 members. It continues its work in conjunction with HL7 in facilitating communication with EHR systems.

 Connectivity Industry Consortium

The experience of the Andover Working Group led, in 1999, to a proposal to form a Point-of-Care Connectivity Industry Consortium, again organized in concert with Agilent Technologies, with the purpose of documenting a set of standard communication profiles that would enable standardized communication between Point-of-Care Testing laboratory instruments and healthcare applications, the ultimate target of which is the EHR into which testing results would be recorded. The limited time consortium was launched in February 2000 and was sunsetted in June of 2001.  Its industry standard has now been transferred as a project (AUTO 6P/POCT1A) to NCCLS for permanent maintenance  by an ANSI accredited standards organization and ANSI HISB member.